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GFY Educational Series: Twitter Social Media – The Mumbo and The Jumbo

Social Media – The Mumbo and The Jumbo

For the better part of 5 years we’ve been out in the Adult Industry extolling the virtues and values of Social Media to reach the massive mainstream market. We’ve stood watching and scratching our heads as performers in the industry purchased 100’s of thousands of ‘fake followers’ on Twitter in some wild competition; and big production companies struggle with the concept of interacting with their consumer base for seemingly the first time through Social Media.

Even more confusing the folks over at Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr are constantly changing the definition of ‘inappropriate content’ that is so vital to the promotion and marketing of Adult Entertainment.

I’m frequently asked if Social Media is “worth the time”, well of course it is – for the first time in history we the story makers are also the story tellers. My 78 year old mother recently joined Facebook. She was amazed at how many “friends” she had in mere days; and now has the ability to follow (and unfortunately comment) on the daily lives of her children. She’s an interesting demographic because she’s lived through the invention of television (and color television in case you didn’t know they were two different things), the moon landing, bellbottoms, fax machines, cell phones, satellite dishes and now Social Media. As we sit on the “bleeding edge” of technology one has to wonder what will be the thing we’re amazed by in 78 years and just how much smaller can our world get?

The Mumbo

For the ‘Mumbo’ talk I often refer to Lauren MacEwen of 7 Veils Media. She and I have spoken on a number of adult and mainstream Social Media and Marketing panels together over the past few years. We also collaborate together for a number of high profile clients in the Adult Industry including Toy Manufactures, Production Companies and Website…

Organic vs Purchased

An organic tweet is a tweet you post on your timeline. This can include a link, and @ mention, hashtags, photos, or just text. Even if it is a tweet that is meant to drive traffic from your site, it is organic because you are not paying for someone else to tweet it or for amplification.

A purchased tweet is a tweet that you have paid to promote on Twitter. You have paid for it to be retweeted by a third party to increase your tweet reach or you have paid someone else to tweet your link or account on their twitter feed. A promoted tweet is a tweet purchased by an advertiser to assist them in reaching a wider audience to gain followers, engagement or clicks.

Twitter Promotions

Twitter offers its own ad service. You can promote a tweet or an account. Twitter promotions are primarily site (Twitter.com) and client (Tweetdeck, iphone app, Twitter for Android, etc) specific. However, some of third party Twitter clients will display promoted tweets, such as Hootsuite.

A promoted tweet is meant to drive engagement with the post, from retweet, to favorite, to clicking a link to a follow. Promoting a tweet means that your tweet will appear at the top of the newsfeed for specific search terms, and potentially at the top of your timeline. It will be marked as a promoted tweet so people know it is an advertisement, which is an FCC regulation that required paid Twitter ads to be marked as an ad by either a hashtag a phrase or a notaion in the presentation of the tweet. Twitter allows you to do highly targeted advertising. Targeting includes: gender, geolocation, device, keyword, interest, and username.

Promoting an account is designed to build your following. Your account will be featured in the “Who to Follow” section, home timeline and search.

Twitter CPE (Cost per engagement) for a promoted tweet is generally between $1.50-$2.20, per their suggested bid. They say that CPE can be significantly lower than this amount. I have seen CPE drop below. $0.50.

Twitter CPE for a promoted account is between $2.50-$3.50 per follower. They say this can be significantly lower and with proper targeting I have seen it drop to $1 per follower.
The primary problem with a Twitter ad is that adult accounts and sites are generally not approved for advertising. Twitter directly prohibits advertising to “Adult or sexual products and services” (https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170427). So though Twitter promotions can deliver a successful ad campaign, it is often not an available option for the industry. This is why we have to turn to alternate ad methods.

Organic
Twitter management is integral for lasting result on Twitter, whether you promote tweets or not. If you want to have a successful social marketing campaign on Twitter, you have to maintain your organic Twitter presence. A live, interactive Twitter account can boost social signals for SEO, increase your authority within your online community, improve your brand awareness, improve your customer retention, improve your sales and drive clicks to your site. The saying goes, “The conversation is happening whether or not you participate”. As a brand, it is to your benefit to join the conversation and position yourself as an authority within that conversation.

Engagement marketing is when you directly engage your consumers with your brand. To be organically successful on Twitter you need to have a strong engagement marketing strategy. This means writing tweets that will help drive traffic to your site, talking to your followers and participating in the community. By doing this you will organically grow your following, pull people to your website, and encourage your followers to become brand ambassadors meaning they retweet your tweets and sing the praises of your brand to their followers.

Organic does not mean not-targeted. Engagement marketing can be highly targeted. You can use hashtags to help target your tweets to trends and topics on Twitter. Through SEO keyword integration, you can position your tweets to appear as top tweets in a topic. This means that for certain search terms your tweets appear in the top of search. You can also target influential Twitter accounts to talk to.

An influential account is someone who has a lot followers and a lot of community influence, meaning they are highly tweeted, retweeted and favorited. They are considered an authority in their community. If you build a relationship with an “influencer” you borrow their authority by simply engaging with them. People will follow you and click your links because that person is talking to you. It can even increase your Klout score (a site that measures Twitter account influence). If they retweet you, you can significantly increase the reach of your tweets which can increase your click through rate and followers.

Stats

Whether you are doing a sponsored or organic Twitter campaign, if you want to gauge your success you need to keep track of your stats. These will let you know if your Twitter efforts are bearing fruit. But not all stats are created equal.
Despite what many people would like to believe, the number of Twitter followers is not your ultimate metric. Quality vs Quantity is a debate that thrives on social media. Big followings look impressive but they are not as significant and big engagement. It is better to have a highly engaged follow that is smaller than a big following that ignores you.
Metrics to pay attention to are:
• Tweetreach
• Engagement (mentions, retweets, favorites)
• Traffic

Tweetreach is the literally the reach of your tweet. It measure the number of Twitter accounts your tweets are reaching and the number of times your tweet appeared in a newsfeed (aka. Impressions). You can check your “tweetreach” at http://tweetreach.com.

Engagement is any type of interaction with your tweets. These are retweets, mentions of your account in someone elses tweet, and people favoriting your tweets. Just as before, the quality of your engagement matters. It is better to have low engagement from more influential public accounts engaging with you than high engagement from people with a low following and private profile. The larger the authority of the people engaging with you the more weight and influence the engagement will have.

Traffic from Twitter can be tracked through your website analytics. It is tracked at T.co under referring websites. You can also track your clicks from tweets by using a traceable link shortener like Bitly.com.

There are some third party sites that will track your Twitter metrics for you: raventools.com, Hootsuite.com, socialbro.com are a few. Most of these cost money to use, however they can be as cheap as $5.99 (Hootsuite). Freemium metrics can be gathered through: tweetreach.com, bitly.com and twitonomy.com.

A strong organic presence on Twitter is key to a successful presence on Twitter. If you chose to advertise through Twitters native advertising platform or through sponsored tweets, a strong organic presence will help ensure the ongoing success of your ads. As your sponsored tweets gain followers and engagement, your organic engagement will continue to nurture those relationships. The organic engagement is the follow through for your sponsored tweet.

The real question we’re both asked over and over is; what is the expected “Return on Investment” on Social Media. There’s no real blanket answer here. Like all Advertising and Marketing you need to balance budget with results (and that means time as well as green dollars) and there’s no single solution that is a ‘one size fits all’.

If at first you don’t succeed… Tweet, Tweet again

At the end of this gigantically long post and trying to look at all the analytics – the one thing you likely really care most about is does Social Media = money? Often we see clients overlook the value of Social Media outside of just generating new sales leads – it’s also a tremendous tool for customer service, informing existing members/clients of updates and new products and content.

Here’s our hit list of things to get and do to have some success in Social Media:
- Get a Twitter Account, Facebook Page and Tumblr
- Build a nice looking Profile on each Social Media site (Twitter just released a slew of changes)
- Include your URL in your profile links (sounds dumb but most people don’t)
- Add Social Media icons and links on your websites (if you don’t know how you might check out AddThis.com)
- Get HootSuite or SproutSocial
- If you’re CMS has a RSS feed; hook it to your Social Media platforms through Hootsuite or http://twitterfeed.com.
- If someone Tweets you – answer them… even if it’s negative comments.

Above all else know there are very few short cuts to success in Social Media – don’t waste your time and money buying bogus followers…

BiosPete Housley (Naughty Tweet): The creator and developer of PornStarTweet and the entire Naughty Tweet Network of sites; including the forth coming Star.XXX. Prior to working in Adult Entertainment, Housley spent 15 years in Corporate America as a business consultant for Fortune 50 companies; and then Advertising and Marketing consultant to Nightclubs, Shows and Entertainment venues in Las Vegas, NV.

Lauren MacEwen (7 Veils Media): Lauren MacEwen is the CEO and primary strategist for 7 Veils Media, a social media firm specializing in the Adult Entertainment Industry. Lauren has a unique way of implementing social media that combines the strategic use of technology and engagement. Her multifaceted approach delivers fast and powerful results, and her recommendations can help anyone build a successful social media strategy.

7Veils, NaughtyPR and the Naughty Tweet Network have teamed up as the Social 7 to provide end-to-end Social Media Relations & Marketing; and as a combined force can and can provide a fresh new perspective and marketing opportunities.

1- You said, "A live, interactive Twitter account can boost social signals for SEO" .... I imagine you are talking about traffic to your site as a social signal since links are nofollow?

2- You said, "- Include your URL in your profile links (sounds dumb but most people don’t)" ... in Twitter it feels safe to do so but in Tumblr or Facebook I imagine they would look at that as spam/affiliate marketing and ban your account and hard work. Thoughts?

I've been using an application called buffer to automate my posts through twitter, facebook and our google+ pages. It is very useful and saves me a lot of time. But you can draw your own conclusions as there is both a free version that, albeit limited, will give you a taste of the applications function.

Something I find many/most business users of twitter seem to overlook is making sure at least some of the tweets you do have a human touch. Its simple to constantly tweet images of big tits or links to your site but Ive found over time that theres nothing better than a good dose of real interaction.

If someone tweets about your site then engage them, post a reply, not just a bog standard "thanks for the mention" kind of thing but thank them and then ask a question "what was your fave scene?" "do you think her tits are big enough?" etc. This generally has two effects firstly, you're almost always guaranteed a retweet, users love getting mentions from a person or company that is recognisable, its seen as kudos so they'll retweet it. Secondly, it starts a conversation, they reply to that, you reply to them etc etc each time allowing you to get a bit more info about the product out there. Info that you wouldnt normally include in a 140character promotional tweet.

The best thing you can do in these human tweets however is humour. You see it regularly, someone posts a complaint or a question to a major retailer, if the tweeter at the other end has a good sense of humour their reply can easily go viral. Massive promotion for what was simply a "sorry you were disappointed" tweet. That kind of thing can turn around a potential problem in minutes. I had a period of time this time last year when I ran the twitter account for a local escort agency, I generally turned all the tweets into some form of comedy version and the difference was amazing. The escorts liked and retweeted massively. Follower numbers jumped quite significantly and calls to the agency even started to mention the tweets as their reason for using them.

Of course, as a supplier of amazing automated tweeting services then I need to point out that human tweets are no good on their own, they work perfectly in conjunction with an automated service ;)

Something I find many/most business users of twitter seem to overlook is making sure at least some of the tweets you do have a human touch. Its simple to constantly tweet images of big tits or links to your site but Ive found over time that theres nothing better than a good dose of real interaction.

If someone tweets about your site then engage them, post a reply, not just a bog standard "thanks for the mention" kind of thing but thank them and then ask a question "what was your fave scene?" "do you think her tits are big enough?" etc. This generally has two effects firstly, you're almost always guaranteed a retweet, users love getting mentions from a person or company that is recognisable, its seen as kudos so they'll retweet it. Secondly, it starts a conversation, they reply to that, you reply to them etc etc each time allowing you to get a bit more info about the product out there. Info that you wouldnt normally include in a 140character promotional tweet.

The best thing you can do in these human tweets however is humour. You see it regularly, someone posts a complaint or a question to a major retailer, if the tweeter at the other end has a good sense of humour their reply can easily go viral. Massive promotion for what was simply a "sorry you were disappointed" tweet. That kind of thing can turn around a potential problem in minutes. I had a period of time this time last year when I ran the twitter account for a local escort agency, I generally turned all the tweets into some form of comedy version and the difference was amazing. The escorts liked and retweeted massively. Follower numbers jumped quite significantly and calls to the agency even started to mention the tweets as their reason for using them.

Of course, as a supplier of amazing automated tweeting services then I need to point out that human tweets are no good on their own, they work perfectly in conjunction with an automated service ;)

It is a very good point. Do not try to make it just another twitter feed, think outside of the box and start some interesting discussion.